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Passages Into College Writing by Jason Schneider

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Passages Into College Writing by Jason Schneider Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018 Passages into College Writing: Listening to the Experiences of International Students Jason Schneider Abstract: Enrollments of international students are at very high levels in the U.S., a development that has altered the demographics of first-year composition classes in recent years. Nonetheless, writing instructors and administrators often know little about these students’ backgrounds, which can make it difficult to design pedagogies that are responsive to their specific needs. Drawing on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study with a cohort of undergraduate international students, this article addresses three interrelated issues: 1) pre- college writing experiences of international students in both their first languages and English; 2) key points of challenge and discovery for international students as they enter the culture of U.S. academic writing; and 3) possible pedagogic interventions designed to better support international students. Situating findings in relation to recent scholarship on students’ transitions from high school to college, the article explores ways in which the experiences of international students are both similar to and different than those of their U.S.-educated peers. Introduction A few years ago, two colleagues and I who teach first-year composition (FYC) for international students organized an event for writing faculty at our institution. The goal was to provide guidance for instructors who do not have expertise in teaching international students, but who often have these students in their classes. We talked about teaching strategies, and then we invited three international students to talk about their experiences and answer questions. What ensued was inspiring: a room of faculty members sat enraptured as these students described their successes, challenges, and grievances as emerging international student writers at a U.S. university. Then, when it was time for questions, multiple hands went up. By the end of the event, all of us were wiser, and perhaps a little humbler, too. I walked away with two key insights. First, I realized that I rarely take the time to listen to my students. That is, I am attentive to them during class discussions and office conferences, when we usually talk about their papers. However, I rarely offer discursive spaces in which they might reflect on their broader experiences as students, writers, and young adults who are working to succeed in the sometimes-opaque environment of the university. Second, I learned that international students enter my composition classes with little or no experience in the academic genres that I teach. Most pointedly, I learned that nearly all of these students arrive at college with no knowledge of research writing in English or any other language. As an instructor, these insights altered my approach to FYC with international students, in that I now carefully scaffold the entrée into research writing, starting with introductory discussions about research as a discourse. As a scholar, the experience inspired an interest in international students’ encounters with writing and rhetoric before they arrive in the U.S., and their evolving relationships with writing as they move through college—or their passages, as I will call them in this article. In response, I began a four-year research project that employs a qualitative case study approach with a small cohort of international undergraduate students (nine). Through this work, I have created a dedicated framework through which to listen to and learn from students. As I will argue, it is only through this kind of attentive listening that writing professionals can appreciate the ways in which students understand and articulate their own college passages—and, in turn, recognize opportunities for pedagogic interventions. The present article reports on selected findings from data collected during the first year of the study. By analyzing the perspectives of international students, I aim to honor their unique experiences, and, moreover, to treat them as a legitimate source of knowledge that can guide pedagogic decision-making. More specifically, I address three interrelated questions about student transitions or passages: 1) What are the writing backgrounds of international students? 2) What are some key experiences of challenge and discovery for these students as they transition into U.S. college writing? 3) How might answers to these questions suggest pedagogic interventions? All of these questions refract a larger question that has become increasingly important to composition scholars in recent years: How do we understand and support students’ transitions out of the rhetorical and educational regimes that they encounter before college and into the world of higher education? Researchers have presented a range of insights on this topic. For example, multiple studies reveal a disjuncture between the kinds of writing instruction that students encounter in high school and the expectations of FYC classes (Acker and Halasek; Addison and James McGee; Applebee and Langer; Denecker; Fanetti et al.; Patterson and Duer). Others, situated within the heuristics of transfer, explore how high school writing experiences can shape the composing practices of college students in diverse ways (DasBender; Reiff and Bawarshi; Robertson et al.; Yancey et al.). Still others highlight the unique challenges faced by U.S.-educated multilingual writers as they attempt to move through the high school curriculum and into higher education (Kanno and Harklau; Kanno and Kangas; Lay et al.; Ortmeier-Hooper and Ruecker; Ruecker, Transiciones). Within this rich and expanding literature, international students have received limited explicit attention (notable exceptions include DasBender; DePalma and Ringer; James). However, given the high enrollments of international students in FYC today, it is essential that faculty and administrators consider their unique situations, which, as I will emphasize, are both similar to and different than those of students who have completed their secondary schooling in the U.S.{1} By engaging qualitatively with international students’ individual passages into higher education, I aim to integrate their experiences into the broader conversations on transition and transfer in FYC, while also suggesting classroom practices that can provide needed support for this specific population. Categorizing and Placing International Students The arrival of more international students has altered demographics at institutions both large and small. The university at which I teach—a medium-sized, private university in a major urban area—is no exception, and the changing demographics have had multiple implications for FYC. Some of our primary areas of focus are reflected in the literature: administrators and instructors have worked to determine the best placements for international and multilingual students (Jordan; Ruecker, “Improving”; Saenkhum); more attention has been given to prospective teachers’ experiences and training around intercultural awareness and multilingual writing (Ferris; Ferris, Jensen, and Wald; Ferris et al.; Matsuda et al.; Miller-Cochran; Ruecker, Transiciones; Schneider); other college units, and particularly the writing center, have worked to develop new initiatives for supporting these students (Bruce and Rafoth; Rafoth). A critical concern that threads through all of this work is the difficulty in categorizing international students. Most international students are English language learners, so they are frequently classified as “multilingual,” “ESL,” “EAL,” or “L2.”{2} Some of our institutional developments have adhered to this categorization. For example, we now have studio sections of FYC for multilingual writers, including resident immigrant students and international students. However, classifying international students simply according to linguistic status is problematic. As scholars in writing studies and applied linguistics have described, multilingual students can have dramatically different educational backgrounds and linguistic needs, and it can be detrimental to group them monolithically (Cox; Freidrich; Ferris and Hedgcock; Lawrick; Ortmeier-Hooper).{3} As a further complication, not all international students are actually English language learners, as substantial populations of international students have completed secondary education in English.{4} These and other factors make it difficult to calibrate broad interventions. Furthermore, efforts to address international students’ needs have to be considered in relation to the needs of U.S.-educated students, whose pre-college experiences are already diverse. From one perspective, all college students find themselves in the same situation: they are being asked to perform academic tasks that likely differ from than what they encountered in the past. In the case of U.S.-educated students, scholars have highlighted several specific differences, including the increased amount of writing students are expected to complete in college (Applebee and Langer); the move from reading and analyzing literary texts in high school to non-fiction texts in college (Applebee and Langer; Yancey et al.); the kinds of issues instructors typically address in responses to student writing (Acker and Halasek); the new expectation that college students will be autonomous learners (Fanetti et al.); and the move
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